One-time “reality TV” star shows real talent in one-woman play

I don’t know who the fuck Bekah Martinez is. Google says “Former TV personality” — The Bachelor, 2018. I can’t tell you how many fucks I couldn’t give. It’s a sign of the apocalypse that this got her 850,000 Instagram followers. It’s a sign of the apocalypse that seven years later there are 850,000 people who want pics of her non-Bachelor hubby and kids popping up on their phones. These are end times.

But never mind. Making her stage debut (as an adult, anyway) at the Garage Theatre in Brian James Polak’s The Call List, Martinez manages all by her lonesome to hold our attention for nearly 90 minutes, despite the fact that the entirety of the action is her side of a series of phone calls.

Samantha (Martinez) works for an attorney hired by a guy named Craig to notify a dozen or so acquaintances in the event of his (Craig’s) demise — which just happened: Craig offed himself with a bullet to the heart. Alone in a small legal office with a yoga mat, vape, and the boss’s neck massager, Samantha is tasked with said notification before leaving for a weekend with her sister and mother, while her father is in the hospital after his most recent suicide attempt.

And so, phone calls. Lots. Some of Craig’s friends/exes/people who barely knew / don’t remember him she reaches, some she can’t. She keeps forgetting to leave a callback number. As she slowly acquires pieces of the puzzle, she becomes intrigued. Who were you, Craig? Why did you die? In the midst of this, Mom won’t stop bugging her, and Dad isn’t picking up.

Polak’s got an idea here, but he hasn’t done enough unpacking of either Craig or Samantha. The few details we get about Craig — he painted, he was married once upon a time, he went to the same coffeehouse every day and was pals with a priest — are not quite clues to a mystery that ultimately we don’t care about solving. “I guess you never really know someone,” Samantha eventually says more or less verbatim, as if we should be satisfied in Polak’s writing there’s no there there. (And not for nothing, but don’t we go to the theatre precisely to know the characters we encounter?)

If we get a better sense of Samantha, it’s mostly due to the idiosyncratic energy Martinez brings to the table rather than anything Polak serves up. Yes, she likes to draw and feels she’s nowhere in life, having tried her hand at a variety of jobs that left her numb. But aside from a couple of generic nods toward family dynamics (Dad’s the only one who understands her, while claws come out on the distaff side), that’s pretty much it. The synchronicity of Craig’s suicide and Dad’s attempt doesn’t even seem to register with her  — though it’s unclear whether that’s more on Polak or Martinez and director Diana Kaufman.

But Kaufman has done nice work channeling Martinez’s energy, including some thoughtful blocking that helps keep the play from dying a static death. And although a particular pet peeve of mine is the one-sided phone conversation where the speaker we hear is clearly not leaving enough time for the person on the other end of the line to say what’s supposedly being said, Martinez probably strikes the right balance between realism and obvious falsity, leaning toward the former without creating too much dead air.

What doesn’t work are the music cues. A few ominous metallic overtones à la David Lynch make no kind of sense. And aside from one snatch of song that earns a chuckle, the rest of several ten-second snippets serve no apparent purpose. It’s as if Kaufman suffered a needless crisis of confidence vis-à-vis holding our attention, when that is one thing the production definitely has going for it.

Even if The Call List may not fulfill its potential as a character study or compelling work of art, it does the job as an actor showcase — a success made manifest thanks to a “Former TV personality” who actually has discernible talent. Don’t be surprised if both this showcase and the showcased have a future in theatre.*

The Call List at the Garage Theatre
Times: Thursday–Saturday 8 p.m.
The show runs through May 24.
Cost: $23–$28 (Thursdays 2-for-1); closing night w/afterparty: $40
Details: thegaragetheatre.org
Venue: The Garage Theatre, 251 E. 7th St., Long Beach

(*The Call List isn’t being touted as a world premiere, but apparently this is the first time it’s been performed, so you do the math.)